From idea to prototype in 8 weeks with Dalhousie program

Ashraf Abusharekh, left and Tyler Zemlak are co-founders of Vantij.ca, an app the pair developed as part of a new accelerator program at Dalhousie Unversity. As a porter at Halifax’s Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences emergency room, Zemlak saw the need for better communication between staff. The Vantij app does just that; it helps nurses and porters communicate more efficiently. (TIM KROCHAK / Staff)

For Tyler Zemlak, it all started with an idea.

The 34-year-old was working an overnight shift as a porter pushing hospital beds at Halifax’s Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre emergency room when he noticed a problem: nurses were having trouble reaching support staff using the hospital’s portable phone system.

“When it got really busy, I began to see the breakdown of communication” he recalls. “I immediately realized they were lacking a critical tool.”

That’s when Zemlak, a Dalhousie University PhD graduate in biology and genetics, turned his eye to entrepreneurship.

With the expertise of a business partner trained in information technology, he co-founded Vantij, a company that develops web-to-mobile software to open the lines of communication in emergency rooms.

It’s the passion and determination of entrepreneurs like Zemlak that inspired Ed Leach, director of Dalhousie’s Norman Newman Centre for Entrepreneurship, to pilot Summ’er UP, a new accelerator program that gives first-time entrepreneurs a foothold in business.

“The mission was to get people started,” Leach said. “This isn’t about startups. It’s about talent. It’s about people trying.”

Directed by Leach and his wife, Mary Kilfoil, academic lead for the school’s Starting Lean Initiative, the eight-week program assists teams of new entrepreneurs find the tools and advice they need to grow their startups.

The program is modelled after similar courses at other universities, including Stanford, MIT and the University of Waterloo, Leach said.

For the last two months, entrepreneurs were provided with working space, access to a network of mentors and $5,000 in development capital, he said. They were also paid full-time wages in order to focus their full attention on developing their companies without the worry of paying bills.

“All we did was eat, sleep and breathe business,” Zemlak said.

Two health IT companies, a mobile betting game and a magazine were among the cohort of up-and-coming startups.

Participants were challenged at every step of the way, Leach said. Besides having to meet with prospective customers, they had to deliver a weekly business pitch, complete product market research and, most importantly, learn to fail.

“Allowing young entrepreneurs to speed up the mistakes they’re going to make, or to minimize the cost of making those mistakes, is invaluable,” he said.

Zemlak said he is thrilled with the amount of progress he’s made. When the program began, his company was at “the idea phase, and already we’ve blown past the demo and are starting to integrate a prototype within a hospital,” he said.

Having the chance to meet with and be mentored by some of Atlantic Canada’s top business leaders was another dream come true.

“I think back to the days when I used to be hunkered down in my basement completely isolated from all society trying to work on this by myself,” Zemlak said

Stephen Duff, CEO and president of Innovacorp — a provincial Crown corporation that invests in tech startups — believes mentorship is the missing ingredient in Nova Scotia.

“Oftentimes these entrepreneurs are young; many of them are just out of university and have not really been in a startup before,” Duff said.